Lethem attracting interest
(Trinidad Guardian) Repub-lic Bank chairman Ronald Harford and Barbadian billionaire Kyffin Simpson were at the forefront of an international team of investors who visited Boa Vista city in the north of Brazil last week, media sources in that country said on Friday. Boa Vista is strategically located in Brazil’s northern triangle between Guyana and Venezuela, and is one of the cities that will benefit from the opening up of Guyana’s interior. The ten-member group were reported to be interested in acquiring land and looking at the possibility of linking up with business partners for agricultural projects on both sides of the Brazil/Guyana border, according to a reporter who attended the news conference in Boa Vista. The Guardian confirmed that Harford was in Brazil on private business last week.
According to the reporter, along with Harford and Simpson, the group included Sabi Saylam, Yossi Maiman, Gideon Weinstein, Nir Mogilner, Anthony Taylor, Jason Teller and Lelde Schmitz, a retired senior official with the International Monetary Fund in Tanzania. The reporter said, “I can tell you that both Lethem and Bonfim are becoming South America’s commerce and tourism Mecca, since Brazil started building the international bridge and the gigantic Guyana Road to Brazil that links the two countries. “Although all the investment is made by the Brazilian government (with the hope that the bridge and the road will facilitate the flow of Brazilian products to the Caribbean Islands, North America and Europe) the Guyanese people and its country are profiting the most, because of the unusual influx of South Americans from Venezuela, Colombia, Peru, etc that are flocking to Lethem via the bridge, every weekend.
“You see literally thousands of them coming into Brazil via the Venezuela border and then going to Guyana to purchase the cheap electronics goods that the Guyanese entrepreneurs based in Lethem import from China, Taiwan and Hong Kong.” Simpson, chairman of Interamericana Trading Corporation, the Simpson Group of Companies and the SOL Group, is reported to have told the news conference that he owned one million hectares of arable land in (the Lethem area) and he wanted to purchase an equal amount of arable land in Bonfim Town. Lethem and Bonfim are the twin cities where the Brazil-Guyana International Bridge has just been built (but is not open for the transit of cars, yet.
Only people on foot or bicycles can cross over. Simpson owns the Suzuki franchise in much of the region, and also holds the dealerships for a number of car companies in his native Barbados. Simpson, through the company Simpson Oil Limited (SOL), purchased Shell’s Caribbean assets and marketing system in more than a dozen Caribbean countries for approximately US$200 million from the Royal Dutch/Shell Group in 2006. This means that SOL controls Shell’s retail and commercial fuels business in Barbados, St Lucia, Antigua, Anguilla, Guyana, Suriname, Belize, St Kitts/Nevis, St Vincent, Grenada, British Virgin Islands, Netherlands Antilles and Dominica. SOL reportedly outbid National Petroleum (NP) of Trinidad, and Total, a French company operating a major refinery in Martinique.
